The problem of cybersecurity is becoming more and more urgent every year. Just a few days ago in the United States, hackers managed to stop the largest pipeline Colonial Pipeline and get a ransom of about $ 5 million. Of course, most of us are worried about problems of a completely different level: for example, tracking the geolocation of your smartphone. After all, according to this information, you can roughly imagine your entire daily routine: where you live, when you leave for work, when you return … Theoretically, you can install a spy program on your smartphone, which will “merge” your data to the owner. There is even software that allows you to remotely hack iPhone via iCloud access. In short, there are already a lot of risks today.
In most cases, users simply turn off their smartphones to maintain privacy. By the way, we have already written whether it is possible to determine the location of the turned off gadget. But more recently, more technological and practical ways have appeared – various covers and boxes that completely isolate the smartphone from the outside world. How do they work?
To really assess the capabilities of such accessories, we took a Velter case for a test. It looks pretty ordinary: flexible, made of polyester, has a magnetic fastener. In fact, under the layer of polyester, it has two more layers of shielding material. The company does not disclose the composition and other details of the signal blocking system. It is only known that the cover works according to the Faraday grille principle. Examples of such blocking of radiation can be found in everyday life. For example, the cabinet and door of a microwave oven prevent radiation from entering the outside. And cable shields also use the same principle.
Roughly speaking, the main functional part of the cover is conductive matter. Once inside, the gadget becomes completely isolated – cellular network signals do not pass, it is impossible to connect via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC does not work. In this case, it is unnecessary to carry out any additional manipulations: turn it on / off or activate the “On the plane” mode. Once you take your smartphone out of the case, it becomes accessible to the outside world again. Of course, we could not help but check his work. Our simple experiment is in a short video.
The cost of such a cover is about 3000 rubles. Velter promises to release an application in the near future that will help you evaluate the effectiveness of blocking (though only GSM-channel and Bluetooth).
If you are concerned about confidentiality, we advise you to study our other articles. For example, whether it is worth worrying about WhatsApp's new data-transfer policy to Facebook. By the way, data protection laws are now used even in the production of household appliances: the new Roborock S6 MaxV robot vacuum cleaner is just developed taking into account the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
